CELEBRATE THE "HISTORICAL REVISIONISTS:" Part 2

March 24, 2013

The writings of 1960s historians who became known as the “revisionists,”
challenged traditional interpretations of the interests, goals, and ideology
underpinning United States foreign policy. Historians such as William Appleman
Williams, Joyce and Gabriel Kolko, Gar Alperowitz, Lloyd Gardner, Thomas
Paterson and others who were discussed in a prior essay, http://theragblog.blogspot.com/2013/02/harry-targ-celebrate-historical.html, offered a compelling
explanation for sixties activists and those that followed them about why United
States foreign policy was as it was.

First, the revisionists saw
fundamental connections between economics and politics. Whether the theoretical
starting point was Adam Smith or Karl Marx, these historians looked to the
underlying dynamics, needs, and goals of the economic system as sources of policy.
And, these writers began with the assumption that economic interest infused
political systems and international relations. Revisionists argued that while
security, ideologies, personalities of elites, and even human nature had some
role to play in shaping policy, all of these forces were influenced in the end
by economics. And economic interest shaped how political power was used.

Second, the behavior of dominant
nation-states, from the seventeenth through the twentieth century, was
propelled by trade, investment, financial speculation, the pursuit of slave or
cheap labor, and access to vital natural resources. Economic gain, in the end,
drove the system of international relations. Sometimes economic gain required
cooperation; other times it necessitated war.

Third, since the use of the
word“capitalism,” in the depth of the Cold War, signified that the user was
some kind of Marxist, the reality that capitalism had been the dominant
economic system from the fifteenth century on was ignored by most scholars. As
more and more historians and social scientists employed the political economy
point of view developed by the revisionists, it became apparent that as the
economic system of capitalism changed over time international relations also
changed. Capitalist enterprises and their supporting states accumulated more
and more wealth, expanded at breakneck speed, consolidated both economic and
political power, and from time to time built armies to facilitate further
colonization and control on a global basis.

Analysts, borrowing from Marx, wrote about the evolution of capitalism using
analyzes about the accumulation of capital and newer forms of the organization
of labor. Some theorists wrote about the rise of capitalism out of feudalism
highlighting how primitive accumulation was based on the enslavement of
peoples, the conquest of territories, and the primacy of the use of brute
force.

The slave system led to increased production and the rise of a global
economy based on trade. Capitalists traversed the globe to sell the products
produced by slave and wage labor. This era of commercial capitalism was
followed by the emergence of industrial capitalism. New production techniques,
particularly a factory system that brought workers together under one roof for
mass production, increased pressure to promote the sale of products in domestic
and global markets.

By the 1870s, in a number of capitalist countries the accumulation of
capital, in products and profit created enormous surpluses. These required new
outlets for sale, additional ways to put money capital to work, and ever
expanding concentrations of capital in manufacturing and financial
institutions.

Late-twentieth century theorists wrote about a new era of monopoly
capitalism. Inspired by Lenin’s famous essay on imperialism, Paul Baran and
Paul Sweezy, Monopoly Capital, argued
that a global economic system had developed in which most economic activities
were controlled by small numbers of actors, multinational corporations and
banks. Subsequently some theorists made a compelling case for the view that the
new capitalism of the twenty-first century had become truly global, leading to
the declining salience of the nation-state system from which it was launched.

It was the research contributions of the historical revisionists of the
1960s which overcame the historical amnesia about the connections between
economic interests and international relations. In addition to analyses of
economic and political trends they uncovered concrete cases of links between
economics and politics. These included the influence of huge U.S. and British
oil companies on the U.S. managed overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran in
1953 and the coup in Guatemala in 1954 after President Arbenz threatened to
nationalize lands owned by the U.S. based United Fruit Company. The
revisionists found long term patterns of economic domination and foreign
policy. They also uncovered the aforementioned specific cases where particular
economic elites influenced foreign policy such as to Iran and Guatemala. And
revisionists saw that the globalization of capitalism was threatened by the
spread of nationalism and forms of socialism as a world force.

Fourth, the political economy
approach regarded class structure as central to the understanding of the
foreign policy of any nation. Since every society has class divisions, some
classes dominate the political system at the expense of others. In capitalist
societies, those who own or control the means of production dominate the
political life of the country. Therefore, while conventional analysts
prioritize states as the most important actors in world affairs, political
economists saw states and classes as inextricably connected. Most international
relations scholars saw states as important to world affairs but it was political
economists/historical revisionists who demonstrated the connection between
states and classes.

Finally, revisionist historians
who wrote from the lens of classes controlling the foreign policy process
tended to take a “hegemonic” view of that control. Their analysis of the
concentration of economic and political power was a critical contribution to
theory and practice. However, they often did not factor resistance into their
theoretical frame. The end result was a perspective implied by many that the
United States was omniscient, all powerful, unbeatable, and unchangeable in its
conduct. After the Cuban Revolution and the Vietnam War some analysts began to
write particularly about the challenges that the hegemonic power the United
States faced in the world, even from the Global South. But, in the main the
historical revisionists developed a way of understanding international
relations that was top down.

Many theorists and activists, therefore, remained intellectually
ill-equipped to identify forces that resisted and constrained the drive for
economic, political, and military hegemony throughout modern history. Lacking
the more nuanced view of the drives for dominance and the resistance to it,
activism sometimes shifted from radical enthusiasm to despair.

But in the end, contemporary analysts and activists owe a special debt of
gratitude to those “historical revisionists” who offered a political economy
explanation of why the United States role in the world (and before it other
imperial powers) has been the way it was. Those of us who analyze the United
States and the international system should add to the important theoretical
contribution of the revisionists recognition of patterns of resistance as they
occur on a global basis and constitute an
integral component of the way international relations works.